The migration of important activities, such as financial and health related activities, from the physical world into connected electronic (“virtual”) spaces has the potential to improve human lives. However, this migration of important activities also provides new opportunities for malfeasance through identity and information theft.
To elaborate, traditional transaction systems (financial or otherwise) typically require users to physically carry or mentally recall some form of monetary token (e.g., cash, check, credit card, etc.) and in some cases, identification (e.g., driver's license, etc.) and authentication (e.g., signature, pin code, etc.) to partake in business transactions. Consider a user walking into a department store: to make any kind of purchase, the user typically picks up the item(s), places the item in a cart, walks over to the register, waits in line for the cashier, waits for the cashier to scan a number of items, retrieves a credit card, provides identification, signs the credit card receipt, and stores the receipt for a future return of the item(s). With traditional transactions systems, these steps, although necessary, are time-consuming and inefficient. In some cases, these steps discourage or prohibit a user from making a purchase (e.g., the user does not have the monetary token on their person or the identification card on their person, etc.) However, in the context of augmented reality (“AR”) devices, these steps are redundant and unnecessary. In one or more embodiments, the AR devices may be configured to allow users whose identities have been pre-identified or pre-authenticated to seamlessly perform many types of transactions (e.g., financial) without requiring the user to perform the onerous procedures described above.
Traditional biometric user identification techniques such as the iris analysis technique described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,291,560, the contents of which are hereby expressly and fully incorporated herein by reference as though set forth in full, have limitations. Accordingly, the improved devices, methods and systems for recognizing users using biometric data described and claimed herein can facilitate important electronic transactions while mitigating the risks (e.g., security) associated with those transactions.